User talk:JeremyBarton
Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome, welkom Welcome to the Vim Tips wiki! We hope you can help improve the articles by fixing typos, adding comments (at the bottom of each tip page), rewriting tips, joining in discussions, or making other improvements. Be sure to visit the [[Project:Community Portal|'community portal']] for information about our site, with links to how to pages. Keep an eye on to check progress. Our [[Vim Tips Wiki:Policy|'policy guidelines']] may be useful. We'd like you to join the very low-volume [http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/vim-l mailing list]. Enjoy! ---- Hi Jeremy! You might like to create [[User:JeremyBarton|'your user page']] (can be very simple, perhaps just say how long you've used Vim – see for some ideas). You are welcome to put any to-do or other notes related to Vim or the wiki under your user page. --JohnBeckett 00:50, 27 September 2008 (UTC) Filetype info I like those edits you did to VimTip638 -- thanks. I've been aware the wiki needs some decent information on filetype et al for some time. It would be great if you started that filetype.vim page you linked to. You might find the info I've sprinkled on a couple of other pages useful: *1565 Edit MoinMoin wiki files with folding includes filetype info *667 Working with CSV files links to 1565, but should link to something more generic *626 Open vimrc file actually "info about vimrc"; vimrc links to this --JohnBeckett 00:50, 27 September 2008 (UTC) :Looks like wikia's search around punctuation leaves a bit to be desired, but I think I caught most (if not all) of the pages that had "filetype.vim" and normalized their content after a wikilink to filetype.vim and added Category:Filetype. I wasn't sure what you were referencing with 626, but the other two (and many others) got updated. --JeremyBarton 08:34, 30 September 2008 (UTC) ::Good. Re 626: I'm trying to say that tip 626 is our only page that deals with something similar to your filetype.vim (similar in the sense that 626 attempts to explain some fundamentals of how files in Vim are organised, and is intended to avoid having other tips repeat basic info). --JohnBeckett 12:01, 30 September 2008 (UTC) List of "filetype.vim" tips I've got a local copy of the tips. The text "filetype.vim" occurs in the following (sometimes just a mention; this includes the tips you've worked on): *54 View a Java Class File using a decompiler *118 Use gvim to view page source in Internet Explorer *232 Search JDK help for keyword at cursor *330 How to stop auto indenting *355 Comment Lines according to a given filetype *364 Automatic file type detection with fully qualified ClearCase names *367 Understanding VIMRUNTIME *410 Allow Inform header files to be distinguished from C headers *425 Forcing Syntax Coloring for files with odd extensions *638 Editing ActiveState Perl batch files *667 Working with CSV files *1381 Highlight special filetype docs *1561 Creating your own syntax files *1565 Edit MoinMoin wiki files with folding I think you're doing a much-needed service with this filetype work. I haven't had time to look at today's stuff much (on Recent changes, click 'show bots'), however I did have a quick look at the CSV tip. The previous text gave a very clear example ("Create file ~/.vim/ftplugin/csv.vim..."), while the current text ("Put a .csv rule in filetype.vim") is a lot more vague. I might think about that some other time, but I'm hoping there are some words which would be more helpful to someone who has never created an ftplugin file, while avoiding a bunch of repetition in each similar tip. --JohnBeckett 12:01, 30 September 2008 (UTC) Categories Re your new filetype category: This is great (you know how the wiki works, and have read our docs!). My mind is pretty blank when it comes to organising the categories -- they are very important but a bit of a mess. I would like to mention one point that a contributor made: There should be a tree of categories, but articles should only be in a leaf category. I'm not entirely sure about this, but I think it makes sense. The idea is that a user can browse the category tree to find the category they want, then click it to see the related tips. There shouldn't be a nagging doubt in the user's mind that they need to click every category on the way down the tree, in case an intermediate node also holds relevant info. The worst case of this is Category:Usage which contains 17 subcategories but also 56 tips (because we couldn't think of anywhere better to put them). The suggestion was that it would be better to have a child of Usage called "Other", and put the miscellaneous tips in there (until better categories were discovered). I mention all this in the hope you'll contemplate it, but also because it's relevant to how Category:Plugin is organised. Bear in mind that it's fairly easy for me to make bulk changes with a bot, but we need to develop a plan first. --JohnBeckett 00:50, 27 September 2008 (UTC) :So my thoughts on this were the various shipping plugins (filetype, syntax, et al) should be under Category:Plugin, and any custom plugins could live at Plugin -> CustomPlugins. Of course, something like How to write a plugin seems like it fits in Plugin more than CustomPlugins. Similar to a filesystem, sometimes it makes sense for a directory (or category) to create files (or pages) as well as directories (or, for completion, categories). --JeremyBarton 08:41, 30 September 2008 (UTC) ::I can't think about this now, but any work on the categories is most welcome! Re the "tips only in leaf category" idea, by coincidence, I have tended in the last year to rearrange a number of my directories so files are in leaves only (of course, with many exceptions). It does make finding stuff a lot easier! ::--JohnBeckett 12:01, 30 September 2008 (UTC) ::IIRC, the fuzzy initial goal behind Category:Plugin was to collect tips related to plugins on SF. Because of the "fuzzy" name, some Category:Scripting tips ended in this category. As I see it, the Filetype category is some kind of hybrid child between Category:LanguageSpecific (I'd have preferred "Filetype" for the name of this category ; when I filled this category, I had this name aliasing in mind) and Category:Scripting categories. i.e. "How to extend vim to support new filetypes?". Hence, I'm quite dubious with this new Filetype-Scripting category under Plugin. :: John, do we really need to have the categories organized as a tree? Can't we have something like (LanguageSpecific|Filetype)/Scripting and Scripting/Filetype be a same category? ::BTW, I like the idea of having "tips only in leaf category" :: --Luc Hermitte 17:19, 30 September 2008 (UTC) :::Sorry Luc, I've tried to wrap my head around categories, and I just don't have sufficient calm time to achieve anything. I can work on tips while in frantic mode, but planning the categories is quite beyond me at the moment. :::I think we've just got to experiment before arriving at a good solution. If you would like to expand on your idea, perhaps start a page under your username with some thoughts on how it would look (or maybe use the talk page of Category:VimTip?). I would like to see a specific proposal for organising categories, perhaps with some examples of tips that would be in some of them. :::I'm not quite sure what you mean above. Surely there has to be something of a tree, or are you saying it should be very shallow? --JohnBeckett 05:17, 2 October 2008 (UTC) BTW currently the best category tree is at Category:Browse ("Categories" in the side panel). It uses a feature of a new version of MediaWiki recently installed by Wikia, namely that you can see how many subcategories each category has. Wondering why that doesn't work in a couple of other places (like the Main Page) is on my todo list. It looks like Wikia have to do a couple of things before the tree settles down. --JohnBeckett 00:50, 27 September 2008 (UTC)